 |
| Jackson Pollock "White Light", 1954, Collection MOMA |
Coinciding this month with the large Abstract Expressionism show at MOMA in NYC, a fascinating article written in 1995 has been re-circulating online recently. Though it has been over 50 years since its critical emergence, Abstract Expressionism (AbEx) is still what many people think of as the American art form. How did this happen?
At the close of World War II, there were three coexisting movements in American painting, each vying for critical dominance: American Regionalism, Social Realism and Abstract Expressionism. Artists that belonged to the two former camps populated their paintings with people and they were often awarded large public commissions or included in prestigious museum exhibitions. After 1953, this changed and Abstract Expressionism, an open ended art, free from depicting people, places or events, became the de facto American art form. As it so happens, the CIA secretly funneled money into cultural foundations that were solely created to exclusively promote Abstract Expressionism.
According to the article’s author Frances Saunders, the CIA was involved with financing traveling exhibitions during the 1950s that promoted Abstract Expressionism throughout the US, Europe and the Soviet Union. The US was engaged in dismantling the Soviet ideology at every turn and, to the CIA, art was another means to fight the cold war. To its promoters, AbEx was known as free market painting and the exhibitions were to show that there was no official style and no government censorship. By the CIA’s analysis, everyone would conclude that the US government was unrestrictive and that in America artists could do whatever they desired.
By contrast, at this time Socialist Realism was the government-sanctioned style of the Soviet Union. Socialist Realism was a figure-based art, which took inspiration from the severe art of the Roman Republic. Often depicting a young handsome couple valiantly holding aloft sickles and shears or peasant farmers gleefully gathered around Stalin, Socialist Realism expressed the idea of the worker as hero and the virtues of the Stalinist state.
By promoting AbEx, the CIA believed they were promoting freedom of expression to the world at large. The CIA never interacted with the artists but rather gave money to taste makers and backed off letting them run with the organization and presentation of the art. In the quest by these cultural institutions to dominate the discussion anything representational or figure-based became suspect. In the end, the figure in art became associated with a totalitarian impulse.
Soon the best practices of representational painting were abandoned in the art schools and what took generations to build up was destroyed by a single generation. Art curricula dedicated to the freedom to pursue any form of expression so consistently denied students the opportunity to pursue a particular path, namely that of representational art. It is unfortunate that what started out as a platform to showcase examples of freedom par excellence devolved, in the hands of academicians and tastemakers, into soft totalitarianism.
Read the article "Modern Art was a CIA Weapon” by Frances Stonor Saunders here:
www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-a-cia-weapon-1578808.html
In 1999, Ms. Saunders published a book on this topic: The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters